Eat, Indoctrinate, Love

Travel is the great educator. Off you go on a voyage of discovery to experience foreign culture, terrain, architecture, people, and most of all, food. It’s a little addictive as you start to colour outside everything familiar - your childhood, upbringing, and hometown - and start borrowing from all these new experiences in ways that inevitably expand and influence the way you’ll live. I still poach eggs in water brought to a rolling boil with a drop of vinegar, the way a friend’s Polish grandmother showed me when I lived in Warsaw, and my Greek dishes are modeled after those I ate living on Nissyros, a Greek island. I prepare a version of an Afghan tomato and potato masala dish topped with fried eggs, courtesy of an Afghan friend. And, of course, there’s my passion for avocados, simply halved, pitted, and filled with homemade vinaigrette, just as the French do.

Foreign travel lets you squirrel away tastes and images and borrow them for your cooking, and furnishings when you return home. But when you move whole hog to another country, set up home, have children and live life like a native, the effect is something rather different. Suddenly, like a play within a play, you’re part of that foreign culture, a little personal island of Old World customs, teaching your children about two homes, the one around them and the other, “back home”.

When we bought a 1750s house in upstate New York, its history wasn’t lost on me. As part of the original van Rensselaer estate, it was Dutch owned land, a feudal patroonship, functioning independently from the overwhelming changes affecting the colonies or naissant states of post-revolutionary America. Such a novel and peculiar history struck a chord. In preserving a sense of bi-national identity in my American-born children, clearly I have been running a British-owned cultural patroonship too.

After fifteen years stateside, there’s little to distinguish me from the average parenting practices of any mother of two, except maybe the bilingual use of British and American terms and a good faith effort to wield knives and forks the way nationals on both sides of the pond would do. Over the years, dinner has run the gamut from Thai curries to fish tacos, boeuf bourgignonne to burgers, mirroring the incredible melting pot of American food. But, inevitably, my British upbringing has its own contributions to the mix. Left over Sunday roast ends up as bubble and squeak. In a pinch, a quick supper for the children’s tea can be fish fingers and beans on toast. Pancakes are crepes: breakfast often involves marmite. And we can’t forget good old rhubarb crumble.

The longer I live abroad, and the more I cook with my children, the more I want to serve up the food of my childhood. We must be wired to obsess over nurturing our progeny with foods tied to memories and a feeling of home. I’ve tapped my mother for her own recipes and badgered her into bringing her battered old cookbook on my parents’ last trip over, though we barely cracked the cover. Now, thanks to the ongoing resurgence of interest in fresh food, sustainable local farming, and good old glorious British food, the UK’s National Trust has re-released a cookbook: ‘The Complete Traditional Recipe Book’, featuring such classic winners as Toad in the Hole, Spotted Dick, and a host of regional gems like Stargazy Pie from Cornwall and Singin’ Hinnies from Northumberland.

I practically crowed at this wild discovery. Not only might it answer the daily dinner conundrum (at 480 pages long, there must be a lot of recipes in there) but it gives me an opportunity to recapture all those dishes of my youth, even the hated dumpling beef stew of school dinner days. Best of all I can continue my cultural indoctrination efforts, creating food memories and feeding British culture into my American-born offspring, one forkful at a time.